H3D II problems when using Nikon SB900 flashes

[soren]

Hi,
Using the Nikon SB-900 flashes on H3D II tethered with Phocus and not. It does not seem to be an happy marriage. The camera freezes and turns dead to anything I try to do. I have to remove battery and remove the back and the flash from the hotshoe before I can be able to wake up the camera. I get all kind of errors on the display as lens error, camera communication error, system error to sensorback error. What causes all this? Should you not be able to use flashes on the hotshoe? I use the flashes on manual settings (wish I could us the remote and the master functions built into the flashes). Anyone using Speedlights with same problems and how did you solve it? Is radio triggers the only solution for remote SB flashes? Sometimes I can get thru and can trigger a few shots before it freeze and turns dead. Would it not be great if you could update the camera software for different kind of flash system similar to camera raw when new cameras coming out!!!  

Regards
Soren

[Dustbak]

Same problems here but with the SB800. The camera doesn't like the extra communication it gets from the flash apparently. I now use  multiple flashes off-camera pretty often. Very nice but you do need the battery packs which I just got but now I need to figure out how to use them together with my remote trigger  

Before I used the on-board flash to set off the flashes but in bright sunlight it doesn't always work. With remotes it does but you do need a bunch of power which results in fairly long recycle times hence the battery packs. These plug in to the sync as well. It looks like the SB800's doesn't need that but my SB80's definitely do.

It always seems when you have one challenge figured out another challenge comes with the solution...

[Conner999]

My guess would be pin contacts on the H hotshoe vs Nikon flash units are be incompatible. H might be trying to send data thru Pin A and not getting anything back, etc, etc.

[SeanBK]

Have you tried Pocket wizard to fire the remote flashes set on either manual or its own iTTL.

[Jonathan Wienke]

Tape off all the flash contacts except the center pin, and use the flash only in manual mode.

[MarkKay]

I found that i had to carefully position my canon flash on the hotshoe to get it to fire and then only manual mode. I only have used my mt-24ex macro flash in this manner.  

Tape off all the flash contacts except the center pin, and use the flash only in manual mode.

[soren]

Tape is not an option as I move them around to Nikon cameras as well. I have to get PW as it seems, wish Hasselblad could work more on the Speedlight sytems so you at least can use them in manual mode without camera goes dead on you.

Thanks

[Jonathan Wienke]

Tape is not an option as I move them around to Nikon cameras as well.

Tape the camera shoe...or use a sync cable. Or try a hot shoe-to-hot shoe adapter like this, which only connects the center trigger pin and blocks the rest of the contacts, and gives you an extra PC socket as a bonus. You could simply leave the adapter in the 'Blad, and connect the flash to the adapter instead of directly to the camera.

[Greg Hollmann]

The hot-shoe is primarily designed for the SCA3902 interface, however any "central pin" device
should be compatible with one important limitation: The trigger voltage in the SCA3902 interface is 5
V. Due to an over voltage protection circuitry, devices with higher trigger voltage than approx. 6.8 V
will not trigger. The PC-sync socket has a more general interface where this limitation does not apply.
 
To determine if this is the problem, measure, if possible, the voltage across the hot shoe converter
(central pin and the grounding terminals on the side of the converter), or directly on the flash cable. If
the voltage is more than 6.8 V it will not trigger from the hot-shoe.

I'm not sure what the voltage output is on the Nikon flash.

[Cfranson]

I'm not sure what the voltage output is on the Nikon flash.

It should also be around 5V as the Nikons also have an overvoltage protection circuit in them.